Wednesday, Aug. 11, 1999 | 9:21 a.m.
NEW YORK -- On Aug. 13, make that Friday the 13th, Alfred Hitchcock would have turned 100 years old. His portly shadow has never loomed larger.
Janet Leigh in a shower. James Stewart spying on his neighbors. Cary Grant chased by a crop-duster. Kim Novak in the churchtower. Not only have the images stayed with moviegoers, they've haunted moviemakers. No director so dominates a genre as Hitchcock does the thriller, and to make one is to be influenced by him, like it or not.
"Hitchcock is like a grammar book," Brian De Palma once said, "and it's all there to be learned." Directors have used his plots, his actors, his composer (Bernard Herrmann), and, in the case of Gus Van Sant, virtually an entire film.
Over the past four decades, admirers have inadvertently created a subgenre, neo-Hitchcock: Van Sant's shot by shot remake of "Psycho"; Francois Truffaut's "The Bride Wore Black"; John Schlesinger's "Pacific Heights"; De Palma's "Dressed to Kill"; Claude Chabrol's "La Femme Infidele"; Andrew Davis' "A Perfect Murder."
"In my lunches with him, when the subject of imitations came up, he would shrug and smile and say, 'Let's talk about something else,' " Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto said. "Hitchcock had no great respect for most contemporary movies. He was far too busy in producing his own art."
His own influences came from both art and life. Born in London, just a few years after the invention of movies, Hitchcock began watching them as a teenager and even kept up with the industry trade journals. Around the same time, he read detective fiction and thrillers, especially the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
"Very likely it's because I was so taken with the Poe stories that I later made suspense stories," Hitchcock once observed. "I don't want to seem immodest, but I can't help comparing what I've tried to put in my films with what Edgar Allan Poe put in his novels (sic); a completely unbelievable story told to the readers with such spellbinding logic that you get the impression that the same thing could happen to you tomorrow."
In 1920 his gifts as a sketch artist led to a job designing title cards at the London studios of the American film company Famous Players-Lasky. Hitchcock soon met a promising young editor and continuity supervisor named Alma Reville, whom he eventually married. Although only occasionally credited, she became his most trusted collaborator, his ultimate compliment being, "Alma liked it."
"He would find a story, bring it back, have her read it, and if she thought it made a picture, fine. If she said no, he wouldn't touch it," said their daughter, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, who appeared in "Strangers on a Train" and other movies by her father.
"When they first saw the print of 'Psycho,' right before it came out, there were just a few people in the screening room and everybody was raving about it. And they asked my mother, 'What do you think?' And she said, 'You can't send it out. Janet (Leigh) swallows when she's supposed to be dead.' Nobody else had caught it."
From silent films such as "The Lodger" and "The Ring" to talkies such as "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "The 39 Steps," Hitchcock became an internationally known director. In the late 1930s producer David O. Selznick brought him to the United States where he went on to make some of his most influential films, including "Rear Window," "Vertigo" and "Psycho."
For years he was regarded, and spoke of himself, as a popular entertainer. But in the 1950s Truffaut and other French critics developed what became known as the "auteur" theory, interpreting movies as the director's personal vision. Hitchcock, who died in 1980, was listed among the world's greatest filmmakers, canonized by Truffaut as "the man we love to be hated by."
By the 1960s imitators had emerged and others found themselves compared to Hitchcock -- whether they liked it or not.
'The Prize' (1964)
Ernest Lehman, screenplay writer for "North by Northwest," also wrote this blatant, entertaining imitation. Directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Irving Wallace, "The Prize" stars Paul Newman as an alcoholic American novelist in Stockholm, where he is to receive the Nobel Prize. When a fellow honoree (Edward G. Robinson) is kidnapped, Newman helps find him.
"I was taking a serious novel, written by a very close friend of mine, and trying to make a movie of it. But I finally lapsed into feeling that I could make a Hitchcock-type movie out of it," said Lehman, who even lifted a couple of scenes out of "North by Northwest."
"So I found myself doing that, and, of course, it didn't have Hitchcock. ... It didn't have the importance to be really compared to a Hitchcock film."
'The Bride Wore Black' (1968)
No one did more for Hitchcock's reputation than Truffaut, who wrote worshipfully of him in the '50s and in the 1960s collaborated with his idol on an interview book, when Truffaut was at his peak as a filmmaker. Eventually he attempted his own Hitchcock-like thrillers.
"The Bride Wore Black" is based on a novel by "William Irish," pen name for Cornell Woolrich, on whose short story "Rear Window" was based. Jeanne Moreau stars as Julie Kohler, a widow whose husband is gunned down on their wedding day. Cool and determined, she sets out to kill the men responsible.
Truffaut includes a few clever touches -- one would-be victim is arrested just as Julie is prepared to bump him off -- but Moreau looks bored (even for Moreau) and the story feels contrived. What was personal for Hitchcock becomes impersonal here. Even Truffaut didn't care for it.
Deliberate Hitchcock twist: In the novel, we only learn at the end why the murders were committed. In the film, Truffaut tells us early on.
'La Femme Infidele (1969)
In the mid-'50s then-journalist Truffaut was supposed to interview Hitchcock in Paris, only to slip and fall into a nearby pond, postponing their first meeting for years. With him was another admirer, Claude Chabrol, whose films led some to call him the "French Hitchcock."
Set in Paris, this intelligent thriller reworks the plot of "Dial M for Murder": The wife of an affluent businessman is having an affair. The husband catches on, confronts his rival and kills him. The wife becomes the chief suspect.
With his subtle wit and appreciation of detail, Chabrol has been the most accomplished of the master's disciples. It's the small touches that make the film work: the physical resemblance between the husband and the lover; the civilized banter that precedes the murder.
One sequence is especially worthy: The husband stuffs the corpse into a bag and dumps it into the trunk of his car. On his way to the lake, where he is to dispose of the body, the car is rear-ended. Witnesses emerge. A cop comes to offer help. Only by luck does the evidence remain concealed.
When the husband finally makes it to the lake, the dented trunk won't open. He must part with the entire car, which, as in "Psycho," only reluctantly slips beneath the surface.
'Charade' (1963)
Stanley Donen, director of "Singing in the Rain" and other classic musicals, has long denied any Hitchcock influence on this chic thriller. "He doesn't own the genre, any more than someone who makes a musical was automatically influenced by 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,' " Donen said, referring to another of his films.
Even if Donen wasn't thinking of him, "chic thriller" is almost another way of saying "Hitchcock movie." Set in Paris, "Charade" stars Audrey Hepburn as a precocious socialite whose husband has been murdered. Cary Grant is the mysterious man who may or may not be helping her.
Unintentionally or not, "Charade" works off a common Hitchcock theme -- multiple identities -- and features a rooftop struggle that recalls the rooftop struggle in "To Catch a Thief." To its credit, "Charade" is blessed with that film's catty humor. "It is infuriating," a lunch companion complains to the stylish Hepburn, "that your happiness does not turn to fat."
'Monsieur Hire' (1989)
The French, Lehman complains, took Hitchcock a little too seriously. And so this film does. But Patrice Leconte's variation on the "Rear Window" story still is a highly effective psychological study, suggesting a collaboration in heaven between Hitchcock, Dostoevsky and Buster Keaton.
Michel Blanc plays a middle-age bachelor, pale and unsmiling and suspected for murder. His evenings are spent spying on an attractive young neighbor, whose boyfriend is also in trouble with the law. When the neighbor catches M. Hire in the act, she stalks him, befriends him and eventually humiliates him.
More sentimental than Hitchcock, Leconte tries hard to make us feel sorry for the title character; he didn't need to. Blanc's performance, as good as you could ask for, does the job. Not since Keaton has an actor earned so much sympathy simply by the intensity with which he opens and closes his eyes.
Best Hitchcock image, like something out of "Psycho": Blanc staring from his window, methodically eating spoonfuls of boiled egg.
'High Anxiety' (1977)
"My father loved Mel Brooks," Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell says. "He loved anything that had a sense of humor because my father had such a good sense of humor. He liked 'High Anxiety' much better than the serious imitators."
In this bawdy parody of "Spellbound," "Vertigo" and other Hitchcock movies, Brooks stars as a psychiatrist who takes over The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, where he confronts a resentful would-be director (Harvey Korman) and that shriveled sadist Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman).
The film is uneven, like virtually every Brooks comedy, but Hitchcock fans will enjoy the references and there are some great lines you'll have to see in context to appreciate: "What a dramatic airport!" "Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup!" "That kid gets no tip."
Best sequence: Brooks chased by a bevy of birds, who unload their tidings upon him like great dollops of cookie dough.
'The Crying Game' (1992)
Hitchcock was the master of suspense, not surprise. Had he made this much-publicized film, the "secret" would have been revealed the moment Jaye Davidson appeared on screen, with a close-up that brought you straight to the heart of the matter.
But in other ways, "The Crying Game" is worthy of the Hitchcock tradition of "identity thrillers" in which no one is what they appear to be. In the film, Stephen Rea stars as an IRA member drawn into a world of espionage, trapped between his political ties and his feelings for a British soldier's "girlfriend."
"The story I came up with was a challenge, a very imposing challenge, and Hitchcock's the only director I can think of who's managed stories that do these 90-degree turns," writer-director Neil Jordan said during a press conference shortly before the film's release.
He acknowledged watching "Psycho" and "Vertigo" while working on "The Crying Game."
"In every situation he finds himself ... he has to make decisions," Jordan said of Rea's character, offering what could as easily be a description of Stewart in "Vertigo."
"I wanted a character in confrontation with every aspect of himself. The story allows me to peel his character away to his barest essence."
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